Horde, SquirrelMail, and RoundCube

With a cpanel account there are 3 different mail choices offered: Horde, SquirrelMail, and RoundCube. I am going to explain the major differences between the 3 of them and hopefully that will allow you to pick the best for your own use.

All the programs come with a basic array of features: Forwarding, Replying, Address Book, Folders, Junk mail, etc… I will not be explaining these features as these are a base for all types of e-mail programs and are irrelevant to the topic.

SquirrelMail

The most basic of these choices is SquirrelMail. It has the most basic of all interfaces.

As you can see in the photo above, it is a very basic and just lists your mail. There isn’t much to be said about this save for its simplicity.

ROUNDCUBE

The next is Roundcube. This has a more jazzed up interface using Ajax, this allows smoother selection of e-mail. There is no box checking, you can just click on the e-mail and use the options above the box to deal with the mail. As with SqurrielMail this is a simple interface just used for checking mail.

The is a good choice if you want a cleaner / smoother looking webmail program.

HORDE

Horde is different than the other 2 webmail programs. This is a full featured e-mail program, it has similar features to Outlook.

It has a list of options (in the upper right hand corner and on the left hand side) for you to choose from: Mail, News, Calendar, Notes, Tasks. It also has the feature Layout where you can change how the home page is displayed for you when you log in to your mail.

I hate Horde. It is the worst experience I have ever had with webmail. As the end user, and someone that has been utilizing computers for 20 years, I hope any of you considering it will reconsider. It takes 5 minutes to access the login page, doesn’t delete unless you follow a 2 step process and changing screens or opening Horde mail takes up to 30 minutes easily.

Our agency uses Horde (because that’s what our service provider has set up) and we all absolutely hate it. We are so frustrated that we are considering changing service providers entirely or doing whatever it takes to get something that functions dependably. I see in the explanation above that Horde supposed to have features similar to Outlook. It does pretend to offer those features… if only they functioned consistently and properly. At the end of the day, I suppose we’re all just spoiled to Gmail and YahooMail, etc.

Please note that Arvixe offers 3 different types of webmail with our linux hosting (Horde, Squirrelmail and Roundcube). Each has its own specific purpose for different customers. I personally would recommend Squirrelmail due to its simplicity and speed. All of my family members have switched over to using Squirrelmail from Yahoo, AT&T, Gmail type webmails as they prefer the simplistic and quick response as well as the ability to manage their own emails on their own space.

Thanks very much for this information. I didn’t realise each of the three options is essentially a different method to check your emails. I was looking for an icon called ‘access your emails’. It is so confusing when you are presented with these strange sounding names; horde, squirrel, roundcube and not one of them is an obvious choice.

I just wanted to say… for those of you who are not thrilled with the appearance of squirrel, if you are so inclined, you can either look for or script your own stylesheets and make it look very nice. BTW I use squirrel on my server and love it. If it runs slow, there must be a configuration issue. It’s very lightweight by design. Have fun!

I have been using Horde fot 5 years or so. The biggest issue is that it is very slow opening the inbox when you have many emails and many filter / spam rules. Really anoying. There is also problems reading soem html emails. Some can’t be opened, some arrive as html attachment. maybe som misconfiguration… donät know for sure.

Example: A lot of emails stored in folders, the inbox have 500 emails or so. Server hardware is dual Xenons CPU, 10K, hdd, not sure about the RAM. It’s not the latest Horde IMP, v 4.

I was planing to upgrade to new v5 but I’m more interested now in moving to the ROUNDCUBE. Squirrel Mail may be fast but it seems to simple. I need modern look, fast webamail and features like autoreply and change password. It should also be compatible with ISP Config 3.

I also plan to switch to Cherokee web-server due to what I read about great performance.

Any suggestions ? What should I do? Is the hardware underpowered ? Thanks, cheers!

I’ve been using Squirrelmail for years. It is fine, but is missing the ability to perform advanced searches e.g. search for an email from someone AND with a particular keyword somewhere. You can search emails using only one search field. There doesn’t seem to be any plugin that can resolve that.
Also, it is missing advanced filter rules. e.g. filter an email if it matches 2 or more conditions.
Not sure if other webmail software can do that.

I am new to CPanel. I had the same three options and after reading the comments above I chose to open my Webmail in Microsoft Outlook. Why choose any of the 3 options when I can use Outlook, which I understand extremely well?

hey thanx for this useful information… personally i find Roundcube webmail is the best in all manner.. Now i can facilitate my roundcube with these Extremely elegant and Colorful themes….http://roundcubeskins.com/